Getting Started with HoloLens Mixed Reality
Understanding the impact of HoloLens on the Use Case
You have to recognise that you are going to have to go through an educational learning process first and that you’ve got to invest in that in order to have some understanding of how using HoloLens might impact your business. Then you can look at what you’ve learnt, and from that decide what use cases it will give the most benefit to. And then you’ll need support from innovation / IT areas to deliver that to the business.
Taking a full ‘we’ve got to have a strategy’ approach is very premature at this stage. Have a plan - a plan where you can identify the use case. Deliver that for the business, show benefit, and also show how it will affect the business in the broader sense and affect your existing workflows and processes.
At that point, you can look at a strategy for the whole business and involve other groups who will affected. But, don’t think you can create a strategy now without a greater understanding, without seeing how it will improve the business and without understanding how it will affect other workflows. Create a plan, deliver the plan, and then you can look at a wider strategy picture.
Who should own Mixed Reality within an organisation?
Because using HoloLens within a business is relatively new, you often find that individual groups or individual departments across engineering and manufacturing, as well as sales and marketing, might be driving their own initiatives.
You don’t want to stop individual departments necessarily from researching available technologies as ‘THE’ solution, because they understand their use cases better than anybody. That said, those departments will need help and support, so IT or innovation groups will also need to be involved and need to support the end users in terms of how it might fit into the IT strategy, how it might be deployed etc.
Most big organisations will probably have a Chief Technical Officer or Innovation Manager/Director etc., who will also be looking at new technologies to see how they can help and improve the business.
To add value, HoloLens needs to solve real business problems. It’s a good idea, especially for those that have many different business units, to create some sort of shared group, where you can share experiences. But also probably more importantly, share those use cases and potential solutions, because you’re bringing even more economies of scale into the organisation.
It’s key that it has to be use case driven, which really means it has to be led by end user departments. Without a strong use case, you’re unlikely to get traction, and so the first thing people should focus on is to decide what area of the business they think using HoloLens might help them, whether it’s design, manufacturing, inspection, training or remote assistance.
Ultimately, unless it’s driven by end users, it won’t get traction in the business.
What are the biggest challenges companies need to overcome to successfully deploy enterprise MR?
There are a lot of challenges, but they are all manageable. One of the first things to recognise is, don’t believe what you see on YouTube, depicting the amazing things both the hardware and software can achieve. Be realistic about what you will be able to do.
Choose a use case, look at what is a good approach to solving it and run with it. Don’t try and boil the ocean. Break it down into small elements which will improve your business, and then go out and solve that, and prove that that effect can happen. If you try to be too broad in it, with all the factors to take into consideration, the chances are you won’t get there. Choose a practical use case, and choose elements of that which can be delivered today. You will then show benefit to the business.
Some people think, ‘well, should we therefore wait until it matures?’. If you do, what you’ll find is that your competitors will be 5 years ahead of you. Lots of large companies have already started down this journey and are doing things – understanding it and seeing how it will help and improve their business.
The Time is Now!
With the shift in 2020 towards remote working, the remote collaboration capabilities of HoloLens are more relevant than ever. Now is the time to start making some decisions around your engineering and manufacturing processes and the technology that you could be using.
Today, some organisations have made significant progress. They have adopted this technology and use it every day – they rely on it to perform at a higher level. It has kept them from having to slow down, or completely shut down, when others have. What started as an idea is now being used by teams globally; growth and adoption is still accelerating as more people are exposed to the benefits it brings.
